Freek Van der Herten has written up a tutorial for his site showing the Laravel users out there how to cache their entire response to speed up the overall performance of their application.

A typical request on an dynamic PHP site can do a lot of things. It’s highly likely that a bunch database queries are performed. On complex pages executing those queries and hydrating them can slow a site down. The response time can be improved by caching the entire response. The idea is that when a user visits a certain page the app stores the rendered page.

With a little help from his package it's easy to enable. Just install the package, add the service provider and you're ready to go. All successful responses will be cached unless told otherwise and cache files will be written out to files by default. He does point out that caching like this, while handy and a nice "quick fix" shouldn't be used in place of proper application tuning methods though. He also links to two other external technologies that could be used for the same purpose: Varnish and Nginx's own cache handling.

The Symfony project has officially announced PSR-7 support in the latest version of the framework. PSR-7 is a recently approved standard by the PHP-FIG to make a more structured HTTP request and response structure (to aid in interoperability).

Less than 2 weeks ago, the PHP community roundly accepted PSR-7, giving PHP a common set of HTTP Message Interfaces. This has huge potential for interoperability and standardization across all of PHP. This is especially true for middleware: functions that hook into the request-response process. In the future, a middleware written around these new interfaces could be used in any framework. [...] Today, a huge number of projects use Symfony's Request and Response classes (via the HttpFoundation component), including Laravel, Drupal 8 and StackPHP.

[...] For that reason, we're thrilled to announce the 0.1 release of the PSR HTTP Message Bridge: a library that can convert Symfony Request and Response objects to PSR-7 compatible objects and back. This means that once there are middleware written for PSR-7, applications using HttpFoundation will be compatible.

The bridge makes it simpler to swap out the HTTP layer by converting the HTTP objects into something other frameworks can use (or so others can be used by Symfony). They provide some examples of how to put it to use, converting objects both to and from the standard Symfony HttpFoundation versions. There's also a quick note about the RequestInterface and ResponseInterface structure that allows you to bridge your own gaps between the PSR-7 friendly components and Symfony.

In his latest post Marc Morerashares a new tool he's created to help with testing routes for specific HTTP code responses and other attributes of your "HTTP layer" - Visithor.

Many years ago I was thinking about a simple and fast tool to test specific routes, expecting specific HTTP codes and providing an easy environment of ensuring properly your HTTP layer. So... I present you Visithor, a PHP based library that provides you this functionality, with a simple configuration definition and a very easy way of installation.

He starts with a few quick commands to get the library installed (either globally or local to the project) and how to create the first configuration file. This file defines the tests to execute as a set of URLs with allowed HTTP response codes. He also shares a Symfony2 bundle that can be used to integrate it with your current application, allowing for more flexibility in route check configuration and environment settings. He also includes a quick example of integrating it with your Travis-CI build as a "script" command to be executed.

On the Clancats.com blog there's a recent post showing how to create a web server in pure PHP, an interesting experiment but definitely not recommended for any kind of higher load situation.

Well, this is pretty useless, but it is possible. But again its pretty.. uesless. This tutorial will hopefully help you to better understand how a simple webserver could work and that it's no problem writing one in PHP. But again using this in production would be trying to eat a soup with a fork. So just, .... just don't. Let me shortly explain why this is not a that good idea.

PHP is a scripting language that simply is not really designed for such tasks. A webserver is a long running process which PHP is not made for. Also PHP does not natively support threading ( pthreads ), which will make developing a good performing webserver a really hard task.

He walks you through all the code needed to create the web server (also available on GitHub) by making:

A "server" that does the listening for incoming and sends outgoing requests

A request object that parses the incoming request and makes header and body content available

A response object that allows for the setting of response codes, body content and headers

Exception handling for problems encountered during the request/response process

The full code is provided during the process along with explanations of what each part does. There's also a basic introduction to what a typical web server is and how the process of request/response usually flows.

Evert Pot has written up a new post today with some of his thoughts about what's wrong with the PSR-7 proposal in the PHP-FIG. PSR-7 relates to a standardized interface for HTTP request and response handling.

PSR-7 is pretty close to completion. PSR-7 is a new 'PHP standard recommendation', put out by the PHP-FIG group, of which I'm a member of. [...] PSR-7 gets a lot of things right, and is very close to nailing the abstract data model behind HTTP, better than many other implementations in many programming languages.

But it's not perfect. I've been pretty vocal about a few issues I have with the approach. Most of this has fallen on deaf ears. I accept that I might be a minority in feeling these are problems, but I feel compelled to share my issues here anyway. Perhaps as a last attempt to sollicit change, or maybe just to get it off my chest.

He breaks up his thoughts into a few different categories, each with a summary and sometimes some code to help make his point a bit more clear. He talks about immutability, how objects will be immutable and shows an example of change in how Silex would have to function to follow the standard (with before/after). He then goes on to talk about the "issue with streams" and how the current proposal could allow for changing of the incoming request into a new one with new headers...not immutable. He ends the post talking about PSR-7's stance on buffering responses and how, even if his project doesn't adopt the PSR in the strictest sense, they may still take some inspiration from it.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the third part of their series guiding you through the creation of your first PHP package with a look at mocking API responses in unit tests created via the TDD (test-driven development) process.

In parts one and two, we built some very basic functionality and used TDD with PHPUnit to make sure our classes are well tested. We also learned how to test an abstract class in order to make sure its concrete methods worked. Now, let’s continue building our library.

He starts with a bit of catching up to ensure everyone is on the same page in the development process. From there he starts in on the mocking of the API, preventing the need for the (slow) external requests. He shows some updates that are needed to the main DiffBot class, the factories/entities for making objects for requests and examples of putting these to use in a few tests. Finally he shows the creation of the mocks themselves and the result from a sample test.

As a part of his involvement in the PHP-FIG standards group, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has been contributing to the PSR-7 proposal. This proposal defines a standardized structure for HTTP message handling. In his latest post he gets into a bit more detail on what this means for the PHP developer and how it might be implemented.

PSR-7 is shaping up nicely. I pushed some updates earlier this week, and we tagged 0.6.0 of the http-message package last week for implementors and potential users to start coding against. I'm still hearing some grumbles both of "simplify!" and "not far enough!" so I'm writing this posts to demonstrate usage of the currently published interfaces, and to illustrate both the ease of use and the completeness and robustness they offer.

He starts with a base definition of what the proposal, well, proposes around HTTP messaging, both the incoming and outgoing. He describes the basic structure of an HTTP message and what each part represents. He talks about message headers, bodies and how the current library could return that content. He then looks at requests vs responses, server-side requests and some various uses cases and more practical examples:

HTTP Clients

Middleware

Frameworks

With the PSR-7 standard in place, all of these different tools could have interchangeable interfaces for HTTP request/responses, easily swappable with any other implementation.

Anthony Ferrara has posted another in his series looking at MVC as a design pattern and as an idea for building web applications. In this latest post he goes on to make a point about MVC, how it relates to architecture and CRUD.

Last week I post a post called Alternatives To MVC. In it, I described some alternatives to MVC and why they all suck as application architectures (or more specifically, are not application architectures). I left a pretty big teaser at the end towards a next post. Well, I'm still working on it. It's a lot bigger job than I realized. But I did want to make a comment on a comment that was left on the last post.

He responds to the comment (essentially that CRUD is a solved problem) and where the need for customizations is needed. He suggests what the real problem is, though: the three classes of developers - CMS users, custom developers and users of both.

One of the fun things about trying to support the PHP-FIG and all the good its doing, is seeing blog posts written complaining about it by people that just don't know what they're talking about. I get involved in conversations on Reddit (dangerous I know) on a mission to understand the problems with its perception throughout the community, and try to make more knowledge readily available to avoid confusion. I put together the PHP-FIG FAQ and the rest of the group voted it in, which I believe helped a lot. Sadly some blog posts are sent out by people with a whole bunch of odd opinions that you just can't do anything about, so instead I'm going to respond with a play-by-play approach.

He goes through several of the points Tom made in his original post, pointing out places where the information was either misconceptions or just completely incorrect. He relates some of the autoloading suggestions Tom made back to things Composer can do and how this is different from "magic" on the part of the library user.

PSR-0 has its problems, but they are the two that I have pointed out and they are rather trivial. [...] If you'd like to add custom autoloaders to your Composer packages then go ahead. If you'd like to build your own custom autoloaders for all of your packages then you can do that too, but it ruins the entire purpose of what PSR-0 is meant to do. That's fine, because you don't need to use it, but I am happy as hell that PSR-0 exists and I wouldn't make drastic changes to it for anything.

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial about what they think is the one thing every web developer should understand - the HTTP protocol and how its used in web-based communications.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a stateless, application-layer protocol for communicating between distributed systems, and is the foundation of the modern web. As a web developer, we all must have a strong understanding of this protocol. Let’s review this powerful protocol through the lens of a web developer. We’ll tackle the topic in two parts. In this first entry, we’ll cover the basics and outline the various request and response headers.

They cover some of the basics of the protocol first including its statelessness, the concept of URLs and the HTTP "verbs" (like GET, POST and DELETE). They also briefly cover the HTTP response codes (ex. 200, 304) and the flow of the request and response to and from the web server. They also look at some of the basic HTTP headers and the actual low-level text formats of the requests/responses.

There's a section at the end of the post that links you to a few tools that you can use to view the HTTP messaging happening in your requests, some of which you might already have. They also briefly cover the use of HTTP in a few libraries - ExpressJS, Ruby on Rails and jQuery's Ajax handling.